Is your smartphone making you stupid?

Psychologists say that not only are phones shortening our attention spans, they are also changing our brains

We reach for your smartphone as soon as we wake; Twitter, Facebook, emails. If we have an appointment, straight to Google maps and we arrive without having a clue where an earth we are! We can’t recall simple details, but there’s no need — they’re a tap away…….

Dr Richard Graham, a consultant psychiatrist and technology addiction specialist at the Nightingale Hospital in London comments that although it may have caused relationship disputes on every journey, but navigating with the London A-Z was a valuable mental exercise. “Being able to imagine that route in your mind and transplant virtually what you saw — there’s a lot of mental work going on.”

He cites a 2006 University College London study, which found that London taxi drivers had large hippocampuses — the brain area associated with long-term memory and spatial awareness — because “the knowledge” was such a feat of recall.